At the moment at Form3 we configure Kong using a custom Ruby script that runs on our Kong container and configures Kong upon boot up. Whilst this works there are a number of problems with this approach:

It is hard to know what the end state of Kong is as you end up with a whole bunch of Ruby code that is hard to follow

If you want to migrate the container over time it can be quite tricky as its hard to clean up APIs, consumers and other Kong resources as you delete them (the database Kong uses is long lasting)

By writing a custom terraform provider for Kong all of these problems go away. As terraform uses a declarative language you simply declare the state that you want the thing you are configuring to be in (in this case Kong) and terraform looks at the current state and automatically works out how to get there. This makes everything so much simpler. A good example is if you remove an API in our current world you have to remember to write a line of Ruby to delete the old API. When using terraform you simply remove the API from your configuration and terraform deletes it for you.

Building upon the way that I wrote gokong I wrote terraform provider kong in the same vein, ie full stack testing using real components and no mocks! This means that the acceptance tests in terraform provider kong spin up a real Kong container and apply terraform plans to it, check it is in the expected state and then destroy it again. Testing in this way gives you ultimate confidence that the code works!

To automate releases of new versions of terraform provider kong I have used the excellent goreleaser. Goreleaser automates building your code for multiple platforms, zipping/tar balling it up and uploading it to github. It is so easy to use, kudos to the authors. To setup you simply need to create a goreleaser.yml file:

My file specifies the binary and builds for mac (Darwin), Linux and Windows. The last part is to define a task to run goreleaser as part of your build. Goreleaser will only run when the build is running as a tag build, therefore you can create a task and run it on every build and goreleaser will only build a release for a tagged build, pretty smart. My build task to create a release looks like:

I run the release task as part of every travis build. You also need to create a github token which is used by goreleaser to upload the release to your github account. To generate a github token go to https://github.com/settings/tokens/new. Then simply set it as a secure environment variable in your .travis.yml and goreleaser will pick it up for you.

Then when you want to create a release you can simply do:

Which will build a new v0.1.0 release and automatically create the binaries and upload the release to Github. Pretty smart!

The last thing I wanted to go through was that I’m taking advantage of the build matrix feature of travis to run the tests against multiple versions of kong. The following section of my travis.yml file:

Travis will automatically run a build for each line under the matrix definition. Each with the values on the line. I pass the KONG_VERSION parameter all of the way through to the code that pulls the Kong container for Docker so it will pull the version that is specified here. Hence I can easily update this build to run against many versions of Kong. As new versions are released I can simply add a line to the build matrix and it will automatically be tested on travis. This is a really powerful feature, being able to run your tests against multiple versions of a target piece of software is immense!

At form3 I have recently solved an interesting problem to route our outbound web hook calls via Nginx. Before I dive into how I achieved this I want to set the landscape as to why you would want to do this.

For web hook calls your customer has to open up a https endpoint on the internet, so you really want to present a client certificate so the person receiving your call can verify it really is you calling them. You could add the client auth code directly inside your service (our service is written in Java). Although this becomes a pain for a number of reasons. Firstly the code for doing this in Java is pretty cumbersome. Secondly it means you now need to deploy this client certificate inside your application or load it in somehow, which shouldn’t really be the concern of the application.

The solution to all of this is to route the outbound call through Nginx and let Nginx take care of the client auth. This is much neater as it means the application doesn’t need to worry about any certificates, instead it can simply post to Nginx and let Nginx do all of the heavy TLS lifting.

The set_by_lua block is a piece of lua code that url decodes the address query string parameter. the ngx.var.arg_address relates to the address query string parameter. Note that you can replace address with anything to read any parameter from the query string. This address is then used on line 12 as the proxy_pass parameter. Lines 13 and 14 do the client auth signing.

The last trick to making all of this work was working out that the IP address on line 6 needs to change based on where you are running this. This line is basically telling Nginx which DNS server to use to look up the proxy address. Locally on my machine I need to use 127.0.0.11 (the docker DNS server) however on AWS this address changes. The last part of the jigsaw was working out how to find this dynamically. You can do that by issuing the following command cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | cut -d' ' -f2-. Once I had cracked that, I then updated the Nginx config file to be a template:

We then use something like the following startup script on our docker container that derives from openresty/openresty :

The clever part here is that we are setting an Environment variable on the fly which is the IP address of the DNS server using the command we worked out above. Then we are using envsubst to substitute any environment variables in our template config file and writing our templated file out to disk. So when Nginx starts the IP address will be correct. This will all happen as the container starts so wherever the container is running (locally or on AWS) it will get the correct IP address and work.

I like to practice the approach of full stack component testing where the guiding principle is that you test the entire component from as high level as possible and only stub out third party dependencies (read other APIs) or something that isn’t easily available as a docker container. I have recently started a golang project to write a client for kong and I thought this would be a good opportunity to use this testing strategy in a golang project.

I love Go but the one thing I don’t like so much about it is the approach that most people seem to be taking to testing. A lot of tests are at the method level where your tests end up being tightly coupled to your implementation. This is a bad thing. You know a test is not very good when if you have to change your test when you change your implementation. The reason this is bad is because firstly as you are changing your test the same time as you are changing your code once you have finished you have know way of knowing if the new implementation still works as the test has changed. It also restricts how much you can get in and edit the implementation as you have constantly having to update the way the tests mock out everything. By testing at the top component level the tests do not care about the implementation and the code runs with real components so it works how it will in the real world. By writing tests in this way I have seen a lot less defects and have never had to manually debug something.

Anyway back to the subject of the full stack testing approach in Go. To start I used the excellent dockertest project which gives you a great API to start and stop docker containers. I then took advantage of the fact that in a Go project there is a special test function that gets called for every test run:

In the above method you can do your test setup code where I have placed the //setup comment and your teardown code where I have placed the //teardown comment. The code that gets returned by m.Run() is the exit code from the test run. Go sets this to non zero if the test run fails so you need to exit with this code so your build will fail if your test run fails. Now using this method I can start the kong docker container, run the tests and then stop the kong docker container. Here is the full TestMain code at time of writing:y

I have wrapped the starting and stopping of the kong container in a method to abstract away the detail. Notice how the StartKong method takes the Kong version as a parameter. It gets the Kong version either from the environment variable KONG_VERSION or if that environment variable is not set then it uses the default Kong version which I set to the latest version 0.11 at time of writing. The cool thing about this is that if I want to run my tests against a different version of Kong I can do that easily by changing this value. The really cool thing about this is that I can run the build against multiple versions of Kong on travis-ci by taking advantage of the env matrix feature. If you list multiple values for an environment variable in travis-ci then travis-ci will automatically run a build for each entry. This means it is really easy to run the whole test pack against multiple versions of Kong which is pretty neat. You can check out the gokong build to see this in action!

The one part you may be wondering from all of this is how do I get the url of the container that Kong is running on for use in my tests. That is done by setting an environment variable KONG_ADMIN_ADDR. The client uses that environment variable if set and if not then it defaults to localhost:8001.

With all of this in place it allows me to test the client by hitting a real running Kong in a container, no mocks in sight! How cool is that. Plus I can run against any version of Kong that is built as a docker container with a flick of a switch!

Here is an example of what a test looks like so you can get a feel:

I think that is really clean and readable. All of the code that boots up and tears down Kong is out of sight and you can just concentrate on the test. Again with no mocks around 🙂

If you want to see the rest of the code or help contribute to my gokong project that would be great. I look forward to any feedback you have on this.

This script will download your release to the /tmp/ directory, from there you can untar and move it etc.

To take this a stage further if you want to download your release as part of a docker build you can use the Dockerfile snippet below to give you a starting point:

The trick here is that we are passing in the GITHUB_TOKEN using a docker build arg. This allows you to build the container using travis by setting a secure ENV variable and then passing that into your docker build script as the docker arg parameter. For example:

In the script above we check that the GITHUB_TOKEN env variable is set and if it isn’t then we terminate with a non zero exit code, halting the build. This then allows developers to run the build with their own GITHUB_TOKEN and you can run this build on travis by setting a secure env variable (or the equivalent in the builder server you are using).

On AWS using SNS to fan out to multiple SQS queues is a common scenario. SNS fan out means creating a SQS queue for each consumer of an SNS message and subscribing each SQS queue to the SNS topic. This means when a message is sent to the SNS topic a copy of the message arrives in each consumer’s queue. It gives you multicast messaging and the ability to consume messages at your own pace and allowing you to not be online when a notification occurs.

I wanted to use SNS fan out in one of our components and as our testing model tests at the component level this means I needed to get a SNS SQS solution working in docker. Step forward ElasticMq and SNS.

When started with the docker-compose up command the containers span up ok. The problem came when publishing a message to the sns topic using the following command:

The error received was:

So not a great start. For some reason the SNS container could not send the message on to the sqs container. Time to debug why….

The first step to working out why was going onto the SNS container and sending a message to the SQS container. This tells us whether or not the containers can talk to each other. When running this test the message got sent to the SQS queue successfully.

The next stage in testing was to look at the code for the SNS library to see if I could work out whether it logged out the SQS queue name it was trying to send it to. Upon inspection I realised that the SNS library was using Apache Camel to connect to SQS. I noticed that in the source code for Apache Camel it does log out a lot more information when the log level is set to trace. Going back to the SNS library there is the following logback.xml file:

I simply cloned the SNS repository from github, updated the level from DEBUG to TRACE and then recompiled the SNS code using the command sbt assembly. Once this finished it was simply a matter of copying the new jar into the root of the folder where I had cloned the SNS repo and updating the Dockerfile to use my newly compiled jar. The last change needed was updating the docker-compose.yml file in the example directory to:

The important line being that we are now using the local SNS container not the one from Github. To build this I simply ran docker-compose build and then docker-compose up. This time the SNS container started logging with trace logging. When I sent a message to SNS I got a much more informative error message:

Its clear now that the url for the queue is being set incorrectly. It should be http://sqs:9324/queue/queue1 as sqs is the name of the container, the reason we were getting connection refused before was that the messages were being sent to the host. To work out how to change this we had to dig through the Apache Camel code to work out how it configures its queue urls. We found that it queries sqs using the list queues command. Running the same list queues command on our running container revealed that the queues were being bound to localhost and not sqs.

To change this we simply had to use the following config file for elasticmq:

The key line being “host = sqs”. The last part to making everything work was updating the docker-compose.yml file to include the config file for elastic mq:

Once I tore down the containers and started them up again I ran the list queues command, this time the queues came back bound to sqs: http://sqs:9324/queue/queue1. I then ran the command to send the a message to SNS and could see it successfully get sent to SQS by receiving it with the following command:

And there we have it, a working SNS fan out to SQS using docker containers. The author of the SNS container has accepted a PR from my colleague sam-io to update the example docker-compose.yml with the fixes described here. Meaning that you can simply clone the SNS repository from github cd into the example directory and run docker-compose up and everything should work. A big thanks to the open source community and people like Sergey Novikov for providing such great tooling. Its great to be able to give something back!

An interesting problem I’ve recently had to solve is to integrate with a third party client who wanted to communicate with our services over the internet and use mutual client auth (ssl) to lock down the connection. The naive way to solve this would have been to put the code directly into the java service itself. This however is quite limiting and restrictive. For example if you want to update the certificates that are allowed you need to rerelease your service and your service is now tightly coupled to that customer’s way of doing things.

A neater solution is to offload this concern to a third party service (in this case nginx running on a docker container). This means that the original service can talk using normal http/s to nginx and nginx can do all of the hard work of the mutual client auth and proxying the request onto the customer.

When implementing this solution I couldn’t find a full example of how to set this up using nginx so I wanted to go through it. I want to split the explanation into two halves outgoing and incoming. First lets go through the outgoing config in nginx:

This is a pretty simple block to understand. It says we are hosting a server on port 8888 at the root. We are going to proxy all requests to http://thirdparty.com/api/ and use the client certificate specified to sign the requests. Pretty simple so far. The harder part is the configuration for the inbound:

Before I explain the config block above I wanted to point out that in practice you place all of the code in the above two snippets inside the same http block.

Starting at the server block we can see that we are listening on port 443 (normal https port) using the hostname inbound.mycompany.com. This is where the ssl will terminate. We are using an AWS ELB to load balance requests to a pool of nginx servers that handle the ssl termination. The ssl_client_certificate is the ca bundle pem for all of the certificates with trust (intermediate and root authorities). The ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key host the server certificate (for the ssl endpoint ie a certificate with the subject name “inbound.mycompany.com”). ssl_verify_client on means to check that the client is trusted and ssl_verify_depth is how far down the certificate chain to check. The if statement says if we have verified that the presented client certificate is indeed one that we trust then lets check that the subject distinguished name is one that we are allowing explicitly. This is done by checking the map above. In my example config above the only subject distinguished name that will be allowed is “CN=inbound.mycompany.com,OU=My Company,O=My Company Limited,L=London,C=GB”. If the subject distinguished name is not allowed then nginx will return http code 403 forbidden. If it is allowed then we proxy the request onto myservice through linkerd.

By using a map to define allowed subject distinguished names we can easily generate this programmatically and it keeps all of the allowed subject distinguished names in a single place.

I really like the solution above as all of our services can talk to their local linkerd container ( see my linkerd post on running linkerd on AWS ECS), then linkerd can take care of talking using https between server boundaries and then nginx can take care of doing the ssl mutual auth to talk to the customer. The service does not need to worry about any of that. In fact as far as the service is concerned it is talking to a service running on the box (the local linkerd instance). This means it is much more flexible and if you have another service that needs to talk to that customer using mutual ssl that service can just talk through the same channel through linkerd and nginx. If you did it using the mutual ssl code directly in your service you would then have two copies (or two references) to a library to handle the mutual ssl that you would have to keep up to date with your client’s allowed certificates. That could quickly explode as you have to write more services or have more customers that want to use mutual client auth and would quickly become a nightmare to maintain. By solving this problem using a single service for just this job all of the ssl configuration is in a single place and all of the services are much simpler to write.

I recently solved an interesting problem of configuring linkerd to run on an AWS ECS cluster.

Before I explain the linkerd configuration I think it would help to go through a diagram showing our setup:

A request comes in the top it then gets routed to a Kong instance. Kong is configured to route the request to a local linkerd instance. The local linkerd instance then uses its local Consul to find out where the service is. It Then rewrites the request to call another linkerd on the destination server where the service resides (the one that was discovered in consul). The linkerd on the service box then receives the request and uses its local consul to find the service. At this point we use a filter to make sure it only uses the service located on the same box as essentially the service discovery has already happened by the calling linkerd. We then call the service and reply.

The problem to solve when running on AWS ECS is how to bind to only services on your local box. The normal way of doing this is to use the interpreter “io.l5d.localhost” (localhost). Which will then filter services in consul that are on the local host. When running in a docker container this won’t work as the local ip address of the linkerd in the docker container will not be the ip address of the server it is running on. Meaning when it queries consul it will have no matches.

To solve this problem we can use the specificHost filter (added recently). We can use this to provide the IP address of the server to filter on. Now we run into another problem where we do not know the ip address of the server until runtime. There is a neat solution to this problem. Firstly we can write our own docker container based off the official one. Next we define a templated config file like this:

Notice that I have used $LOCAL_IP instead of the actual ip. This is because at runtime we can write a simple script that will set the $LOCAL_IP environment variable to the IP of the box the container is running on and then substitute all environment variables in the config and then run linkerd.

The trick here is to use the AWS meta endpoint to grab the local ip of the machine. We then use the envsubst program to substitute out all environment variables in our config and build a real linkerd.conf file. From there we can simply start linkerd.

This dockerfile uses dumb-init to manage the linkerd process. It installs the gettext package which is where the envsubst program lives. It then kicks off the entrypoint.sh script which is where we do our environment substitution and start linkerd.

The nice thing about this is we can put any environment variables we want into our linkerd config template file and then supply them at runtime in our task definition file. They will then get substituted out when the container starts. For example I am supplying the common name to use for ssl this way in my container.

Although this solution works it would be great if linkerd supported having environment variables inside its config file and swapped them out automatically. Maybe a pull request for another time…